The Hypochondriac's Guide to Life. and Death. (8 page)

When I was
twelve years old, my classmate Kenneth told ø øme that if your urine smelled funny after you ate asparagus it meant you had cancer of the larynx. This frightened me, even though I did not, technically, know where the larynx was. Kenneth said it was the “stomach bone.”

After worrying in silence for a week and probing gingerly for signs of an enlarged stomach bone, I finally screwed up my courage and asked my mom, who informed me that some people's urine smells funny after they eat asparagus
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and that it doesn't mean anything bad. So I owed Kenneth one. It proved easy. Kenneth was not a mental giant. I told him the Punic Wars were between the Phoenicians and “the Krauts,” and he wrote this on a test.

Revenge, it is said, is sweet. Mine had a sour undertaste, From that moment on, I sensed in myself something unhealthy. Many things unhealthy, in fact. It was the first tentative awakening of
what was to become a lifelong engagement with hypochondria. For much of my life I was a hypochondriac, and now I am cured. Disclosure of the details of my cure will provide the spectacular denouement of this book, rewarding the loyal reader with soulshattering insights into the delicate nexus of the psychological, physiological, and spiritual roots of disease, not to mention an anecdote about unconscious people farting. But all that will come later. I will disclose this much right now: When chronic illnesses are cured, the cure often comes about incrementally, over time, without a single, dramatic, defining moment. But the cure for my hypochondria occurred on September 17, 1991, a Day That Will Live in Infirmity. It was shortly after ten o'clock
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in the morning. It was a Tuesday. It was raining. God wept. But I am getting several chapters ahead of myself.

When I was thirteen, I began going to the dentist all the time, complaining of tooth pain. This was partly hypochondria, but mostly it was substance abuse. My dentist, whom I will call Dr. Bliss, had a practice that, as far as I could tell, consisted primarily of dispensing nitrous oxide. He would give you nitrous oxide to clean your teeth. He would give you nitrous oxide when he
examined
your teeth. He would give you nitrous oxide when he was in the other room, working on someone
else's
teeth. Dr. Bliss's patients—men, women, kids, blue-haired grandmas—would sit in his waiting room fidgeting and eyeing each other guiltily, like crack addicts.

Nitrous oxide is called laughing gas, though I never understood why. It never made me laugh. It was like sex:
waaaay
too intense to make you laugh, but hardly unenjoyable. Each time I was under nitrous oxide I would attain some overwhelming philosophical revelation that disappeared the instant I came out of the anesthesia. At this critical juncture, I once ripped off the rubber mask, grabbed a pen from the doctor's shirt pocket, and scribbled my insight onto my bib. This is what I wrote, in its entirety:

“I-N-GÜ”

In subsequent visits I honed this revelation, eventually determining that the meaning of life involved gerunds. But that is about as far as I got.
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Personally, I think Dr. Bliss was everything you could want in a dentist, except that by the time I was sixteen, my molars were made entirely of ferrous compounds.

Though rooted in childhood, my hypochondria did not fully manifest itself until I was a young adult. For that I credit Dr. Katzev, my family doctor when I was a boy. Dr. Katzev was a crusty old guy who did not believe in pampering you or letting you pamper yourself. He was an ascetic. He believed absolutely in letting diseases take their natural course. Once, after he examined my brother, his diagnosis was: “If spots develop, it's the measles.”

Dr. Katzev actually made house calls. He would barge into my bedroom, pull off the covers, and fling open the window, even if it was the dead of winter and I had a fever of 103. “The body has to breathe,” he would say. Then he would instruct me to stop that infernal tooth chattering. To the best of my recollection, Dr. Katzev's diagnosis was always the same: I had a “bug” that was “going around.”

(I would not have been surprised if years later Dr. Katzev achieved fame in one of those news stories you see from time to time where some kindly family physician, beloved by his patients, is discovered to be a refrigerator repairman.)

Dr. Katzev viewed all complaints skeptically. He did not cotton to drug therapy or fancy diagnostic tools. Mostly he used a stethoscope and one of those triangular reflex hammers. One day when I was seventeen, I went to Dr. Katzev complaining of a pain in the eye. He said, “If I hit you on the elbow with my hammer, your eye won't hurt so much.”

Dr. Katzev urged me to keep an eye on the eye and see what
developed. I tried, though it became increasingly hard through the slime that was oozing over my eyeball. I continued watching carefully as a red rash developed around the eye, expanding into a weird, angry blotch that bisected my forehead right at the midline and ran down the center of my nose, veering off at a ninetydegree angle across my cheek. I looked like the victim of some sort of peculiar windburn, as if Ïwere Mort—that character from
Bazooka Joe
comics who wears a turtleneck up over his mouth—and had driven the autobahn at 120 miles an hour with my head half out the window.

Reluctantly—no doubt suspecting that he was shamefully overreacting—Dr. Katzev finally sent me to a specialist, from whom I learned I had a serious viral disease called herpes zoster ophthalmicus. It attacks the nerves in your face around the eye. After the doctor told me his diagnosis, and that herpes zoster ophthalmicus usually clears up on its own, he went into another room and told my parents the same thing, adding something he hadn't thought wise to share with me: that herpes zoster ophthalmicus has been known to cause blindness, and there was no surefire way to prevent this.

So then my parents had to make a decision. On the one hand, being Jewish, they believed in the Talmudic principle of truth telling. On the other hand, being Jewish, they believed it is a mortal sin to cause one's son to worry. They decided to compromise.

Me: So I guess everything is going to be OK!

Them: Yes! Absolutely!

My Mother:
(whispering to my father in Yiddish)
Unless he goes blind like a burrowing rodent, the poor, sweet dumpling.

Me:
(to my father)
What did she say?

My Father: How do I know? I'm half deaf.

I recovered fine. If anything, the experience reinforced in me an appreciation of Dr. Katzev's laissez-faire medical philosophy. The disease
had
cleared up, on its own.

Then, in 1974, Dr. Katzev died of a cold.

I had loved and respected Dr. Katzev; he had always seemed wise and kind and indestructible, and in a generic, no-frills sort of
way he had been a terrific family doctor. He cared about his patients. His death—caused by neglecting his sniffles and coughs until they turned into congestive heart failure
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—made me aware of the importance of vigilance in maintaining good health.
Profoundly
aware.

I was twenty-three. Around that time I developed a pain in my jaw. I went to see a doctor. The doctor was stymied. Thinking aloud, he made an observation. It wasn't a diagnosis; he was simply making pleasant conversation, sharing his knowledge. He should writhe in hell for all eternity. What he said was that he had just read about a study of soldiers in World War I. If they came under hostile fire, they had been trained to fling themselves forward into a prone position, with their rifles flat out in front of them, at arm's length. Sometimes, a soldier's chin would come down on his rifle stock. And about a year later, this soldier would begin to experience undifferentiated pain in his jaw, not dissimilar to mine. Soon after that, his teeth would begin to fall out, one at a time, until he looked like Lamb Chop.

The doctor went on to describe other, more benign possible causes for my pain, but I wasn't hearing him. I was lost in an unimaginable terror. Had I suffered a minor blow to the chin a year before? Could be. I seemed maybe to recall something. I left his office feeling a spreading pain in my jaw, and for weeks afterward, it got worse. Night after night, I would examine my teeth in the mirror, shaking them, feeling to see if they were loose. Have you ever tried that? Try it now. Grab one of your lower front teeth and shake it. Feel that shimmy? It is normal. But you could not have convinced me of that.

I looked in the mirror, and the face that looked back at me was myself in a few months' time. Moms Mabley. I walked around shaking my teeth, feeling the pain creep from molar to molar. It
lasted for months, until I got a great new job in an exciting new city. And rather suddenly, the pain went away.

Years passed, relatively complaint free. One day, I felt an ache in the groin. It started mildly but gradually became incapacitating.

I saw a series of urologists, none of whom could find anything wrong with me. Several of them prescribed medications; one of these, Urised, has the spectacular side effect of turning your urine blue. I do not mean cerulean blue, like the sky on a balmy summer day. Bic pen blue. Once, as I was standing at one of those trough urinals in a bathroom at a football stadium, I became aware that the man next to me was staring down at me, slack jawed. An opportunity like this occurs but once in life. I zipped up, pulled a cigarette lighter out of my pocket, and spoke into it in a robotic voice: “Gardak reporting. Earth colonization plans complete. Initiating return to mother ship.”

Urised didn't relieve my problem. Nothing did. My doctor eventually asked me if I was having stress at work or in my home life.

I said no, not really. And he just stared at me. A thunderclap of silence. And finally I said, “Well, except my girlfriend wants to get married and have a baby and I think the company I work for might be about to go bankrupt, plus I have no talent, no integrity, and no future.”

And the doctor gave me his diagnosis: “You are a young man. Enjoy your life.”

And the pain went away.

Clearly, a pattern was emerging.

Over the years, I had a rather civil relationship with my hypochondria. Each time a symptom would arise, I would consult a doctor—or sometimes two because the first guy was obviously an incompetent. No cause would be found, I would conclude the pain must have been psychosomatic, and it would go away. Each time, however, I had to first become convinced it was something dreadful, because by doing so I would be mentally prepared for the Bad News when it arrived. I think this is at the heart of hypochondria: a fear of losing control in the face of adversity. The hypochondriac resents the arbitrary nature of death. He wants control. And control comes with knowledge.

And so, when I felt light-headed for a month, I leafed through some books and determined it was multiple sclerosis. Stomach pain was an ulcer, and when it did not respond to ulcer medication it was stomach cancer. Once, the skin on my hands began to peel. This was a tough one. Medical books suggest no obvious alarming causes of skin peeling. I eventually found one. It took a little research, but hypochondriacs are not averse to research. It turns out skin peeling is often caused by excessive localized sweating, and excessive localized sweating,
particularly of the hands,
can in rare instances indicate a brain tumor. For days I sucked on my fingers to see if they tasted abnormally salty. This, of course, made the peeling worse. I was eventually cured of this illness by getting a raise.

My own physiology became a subject of endless fascination and terror. I began noticing the floaters in my eye, those harmless, diaphanous shapes that sometimes swim around your field of vision, turning your eyes into snow globes, only without the Statue of Liberty in the middle.
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Most people have floaters, but they don't notice them until one day they do. Then they notice nothing else. That's what happened to me. Before I had noticed my floaters, a pastoral scene would look like this: